INTRODUCTION
The Reinvention
of Love
According to theologian and scholar C. S. Lewis, in his book
The Allegory of Love,
the history of romantic love dates back only to about the year 1000 A.D. Even if Lewis is just referencing the origins of true love as a tradition, it is still quite an extravagant claim. After all, we know from history, earlier literature, and even the Bible that the emotion we call love certainly existed as far back as we can document. Even certain animals, like some birds, mate for life, a fact that cannot be accounted for by reproductive instincts alone. Yet love, as portrayed in classical literature, is a very disruptive emotion, often linked, as it is in
Hamlet,
with madness. In earlier times, it would have been unthinkable, as it still is in some regions of the world even today, for one to marry just because one claimed to be in love. According to Lewis, the troubadours, medieval poets from southern France and northern Spain and Italy, began the process of validating romantic love. They went from castle to castle serenading the ladies of the place with poems that begged for “mercy” that their “suffering” might be eased.
Italian poet Dante Alighieri was a great exponent of romantic love. In
The Divine Comedy,
Dante literally goes through Hell for Beatrice, the woman he loves. Then he goes through Purgatory and Heaven. At the end of this emotional and spiritual journey, the poet is rewarded with a vision of a blinding sun, symbolizing God and perfect understanding. It is not unfair to say that, after the appearance of
The Divine Comedy,
romantic love began to take on a new status in the Western world. It eventually became acceptable to marry on the basis of one’s emotions for a particular person, though of course this did not happen overnight. The tradition of true love during Dante’s time remained essentially an adulterous one. Dante never married Beatrice, and he himself was married to somebody else. Even three centuries later, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet were having a hard time of it, though thanks to an amiable priest who took pity on the young lovers, they succeeded in marrying. Predictably, they experienced tragedy afterward.
Gradually, however, romantic love triumphed, and its influence remains very much intact to this day. This is not to say that everyone has been in perfect agreement with the progress of romantic love. During the twentieth century, in particular, some of the components of true love began to be called into question. Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, in his existentialist masterwork
Either/Or,
begins to question the sincerity of an eternal love. May it not, Kierkegaard enquired, be more sincere, instead of pledging to love your beloved forever and forever and forever, to vow to love her until Easter or May Day, and if that works out, to renew the vow until Christmas? In contemporary popular culture, Tina Turner takes this a step further by asking, in her wildly successful song, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” However, this does not necessarily mean that true love has fallen from its pedestal but only that it has had to contend with certain heresies and palace uprisings.
As with any tradition, things can become a bit stale. As Samuel Beckett put it, “Habit is a great deadener.” D. H. Lawrence completed
Women in Love
in 1916, just about the time romantic love was getting a little frayed around the edges. There are several things that influenced Lawrence in writing this novel. One major factor was that Lawrence himself was very much in love. In 1912 he had met Frieda Weekley, then married to Ernest Weekley, Lawrence’s former professor, to whom Lawrence had gone for help in finding a teaching position abroad. Lawrence and Frieda fell in love, and he convinced her to go away with him—for life. Another influence was England itself, which Lawrence found repressive, its traditions worn out, its emotional, spiritual, and political life stale and unedifying. There was yet another influence, which does not appear to be recorded, nor is it clear the extent to which Lawrence himself was aware of it. We know from Lawrence’s friend Jessie Chambers that the two read Symbolist poetry together. When Lawrence was working for his teaching degree, he studied French literature at the University of Nottingham under Ernest Weekley. Lawrence mentions specifically the poetry of Paul Verlaine in
Sons and Lovers.
Nowhere, though, it seems, does Lawrence speak directly of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, and yet among all the Symbolists, it is Rimbaud’s ideas that seem closest to those of Lawrence. Rimbaud wrote these lines, which coincide with Lawrence’s attitude about modern love, particularly as it relates to his own writing of
Women in Love:
“I do not like women: love must be reinvented, that’s obvious. A secure position is all they’re capable of desiring now. Security once gained, heart and beauty are set aside: cold disdain alone is left, the food of marriage today” (Rimbaud, “Delirium I,” p. 39; see “For Further Reading”).
Women in Love
is Lawrence’s manifesto on the reinvention of modern love, and it was in many ways as much of a bombshell as was
The Communist Manifesto,
by Karl Marx. Afterward, there would be modern and contemporary writers who would rival Lawrence, but none who surpassed him in this area. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
shows the undeniable influence of Lawrence in its treatment of the jaded rich, symbolized by Tom, and their dangerous ideas about race and culture, which are opposed by Gatsby, the symbol of romantic love. However, one could not imagine Gatsby questioning the meaning of modern love nor the tradition from which it sprang.
David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, near Nottingham, England, in the small mining town of Eastwood. His father, Arthur, was a coal miner, the kind of man, typical of workers the world over, who found himself in a dangerous, dead-end job, and even as a miner’s butty, a foreman of sorts, he could barely make a living. He drank to mask his frustration, his pain, and his fears, and he transferred his aggressions to his family in the form of a violence that, while mostly verbal, made their lives at times a living hell. Lawrence thought his mother, Lydia, a saint. However, she was no more a saint than the father was a devil. Like Arthur Lawrence, she, too, was frustrated by poverty and the ugliness of her surroundings. Like him, she transferred her blind hostility against her marginalization to her spouse, falling out of love with him and using his drinking as an excuse to hold him directly responsible for her unhappiness and the lack of opportunity for her children. The fact that her husband was risking his life in the mines every day to provide for her and the children meant nothing to her, and she inoculated her children with her contempt for her husband. No one loved Arthur. No one ever talked to him. No one cared if he lived or died, except as it affected their welfare, and this in turn hardened his attitude toward his family and made him an even more frequent visitor of the pubs. Lawrence duly documents all this in
Sons and Lovers,
and it is difficult not to feel a measured contempt for the mother and the children who hated their father, while at the same time driving him harder to provide more for them. Lawrence apparently never matured enough to gain perspective on how unfairly his father was treated, flawed though he certainly was.
Lawrence’s biographer, Harry T. Moore, writes about Mrs. Lawrence:
She was proud of these children, and fought fiercely to give them good lives: her sons would not go into the mines, her daughters would not become servants. And through the galling poverty of those years she made intense sacrifices for them, particularly in furthering the education of David Herbert—or Bert, as the family called him.
Unfortunately, this is only part of the story. The intensity of love that was in this woman’s being drove itself outwardly in two directions: she hated her husband and, just as extravagantly, she loved her children. These children became a battleground in the parents’ war (Moore,
The Priest of Love,
p. 11).
Lawrence began his primary education at the Beauvale Board School, as did all the other children in his family. Frail, sickly, sensitive, uninspired by his environment, picked on by the other boys because he could not play games, but encouraged by his clinging mother, whose aspirations for him set him apart, Lawrence does not appear to have been an especially brilliant student, but one who worked hard. In his teacher W. W. Whitehead, Lawrence would eventually find a supporter. Whitehead tutored him for the County Council Scholarship, which Lawrence won at the age of twelve. This scholarship allowed him to attend the Nottingham High School and receive an excellent secondary education. It literally changed the course of his life.
After high school, Lawrence worked as a clerk in Haywood’s, a manufacturer of surgical and orthopedic implements in Nottingham, selling elastic stockings and support bandages. It was during this relatively happy period that a tragic event shattered the Lawrence household and left his mother in a state of chronic depression, alienated even from her beloved children, with little will to live. William Ernest, Lydia Lawrence’s favorite child, died of pneumonia in London, apparently from overwork. During the mother’s grieving depression, Lawrence, who had been at the Haywood’s position for only three months, also came down with pneumonia and was on the verge of death. The threat of Lawrence’s imminent death caused the mother to throw off her grief and immerse herself in saving the son who was still barely alive. It not only saved Lawrence’s life, but it created a bond between mother and son for which Oedipal may be too weak a term and which Anthony Burgess, in his book on Lawrence,
Flame into Being,
aptly describes as “morbid.”
By the time Lawrence recuperated, he was seventeen years old. He decided he did not want to go back to Haywood‘s, where he might overwork himself and suffer the same fate as his brother. His experience at Haywood’s, though brief, had been a vital one. It gave him experience, and eventually provided an important setting for Paul, Lawrence’s stand-in in
Sons and Lovers.
Now, though, it was time for Lawrence to move on. His health had become a serious issue. Whether we believe Lawrence’s claim that the pneumonia permanently impaired his health, or believe Lawrence’s doctor that he was already tubercular and that the pneumonia had nothing to do with his future health problems, Lawrence’s health would from that point on partially determine how he lived his life. Thus, faced with the problem of earning a living, Lawrence settled on teaching. In 1902 Lawrence began his teaching career at the British Schools in Eastwood as a pupil-teacher—that is, as a schoolmaster to lower-level students who receives instruction himself later in the day. The following year, Lawrence was transferred to the Pupil—Teacher Centre at Ilkeston, along with another pupil-teacher intern from the region, Jessie Chambers, Lawrence’s first love, whom Lawrence immortalizes as Miriam in
Sons and Lovers.
Four years later Lawrence and Jessie both entered the University of Nottingham in a two-year program for a teaching certificate.
After receiving his certificate, Lawrence took a position as a schoolmaster in south London. Here he came in contact with Ford Hermann Hueffer, the novelist, editor, and critic now better known as Ford Madox Ford, the name he adopted in 1919. After reading Lawrence’s poetry, Hueffer decided to publish it. He also helped Lawrence publish his first novel,
The White Peacock,
in 1911. It was, according to Hueffer, “a flawed work of genius.” A serious blow in Lawrence’s personal life countered this great leap forward in his career : his mother’s death from cancer. Before she died, Lawrence was able to give her an advance copy of
The White Peacock,
apparently hoping that she would know that her love and advocacy on his behalf had not been wasted. The following year, reeling from his mother’s death and worn out by teaching, Lawrence became seriously ill and depressed, and wrote little.
In 1912 Lawrence made up his mind to stop teaching, at least in England. In his book, Burgess suggests that this decision was forced on him by the school authorities, who did not want Lawrence infecting the children with his illness. It was in this context that he visited his former professor Ernest Weekley to ask for assistance in securing a position abroad. Weekley’s wife, Frieda von Richthofen, daughter of a German baron, and Lawrence were immediately drawn to each other. Not long after this first meeting, Frieda invited Lawrence to her home when her husband was away. Rather than have an affair with Frieda, Lawrence insisted that she tell her husband about them. Frieda did not do so immediately, but Lawrence joined her when Frieda traveled to her native Germany to visit her family. It was during this visit that Lawrence helped Frieda compose a letter to Weekley, informing him of the couple’s intent to stay together. It was obviously a momentous event for them both. For Lawrence, in particular, eloping with Frieda marked a turning point in his creative as well as his social and spiritual life. In Italy, where Lawrence and Frieda finally settled, the two found, if not complete harmony (Frieda admitted publicly that they “fought like hell”) certainly a life of travel and interesting friends. Lawrence entered then into one of his most fertile periods of work—beginning in 1912 when Lawrence began
Sons and Lovers
and culminating in 1920 with the publication of
Women in Love
—that ranks as one of the greatest and most fertile periods of any writer in the twentieth century.
In Germany, the miner’s son, Bert of Eastwood, having stolen the wife of a respected professor, rubbing shoulders with a German aristocracy that only a few months before could have existed only as a figment of his imagination, and above all, having found love, had certainly arrived. “I am living here with a lady whom I love, and whom I shall marry when I come to England, if possible... ,” Lawrence wrote Louie Burrows, a former girlfriend, trying desperately to mask his pride in his new circumstance. “We have been together as man and wife for six months, nearly, now, and I hope we shall always remain man and wife.” In Germany he received a copy of his second novel,
The Trespasser,
which Hueffer also helped publish, though he felt it was an even more flawed work of genius than
The White Peacock.
It speaks well of Hueffer that he was able to judge Lawrence’s genius and assist him, even though he later claimed not to have liked Lawrence. Lawrence and Frieda settled in Gargnano, Italy, where over the next two years, Lawrence completed
Sons and Lovers,
began the novel he originally called
The Sisters,
published
Love Poems and Others,
and wrote perhaps his greatest short story, “The Prussian Officer.”